Currently, service providers are limited to the options they can provide when it comes to getting voice, video, and data transmissions over to a redundant circuit after a primary circuit fails. Further, service providers are often times limited in how fast they can move the traffic over after a failure to get the site back up and running and how well traffic can be moved to the secondary (or redundant) circuit. Typically, the transition is not seamless and is extremely interruptive to those utilizing the circuits. Customers are being limited to how well their traffic will perform across the circuits before, during, and after a failover simply because customers and service providers only have visibility into one small piece of an actual transmission that is going from a branch office to a data center and vice versa.
To further complicate the lack of visibility by the service providers, there are usually several local exchange carriers (LEC) involved in a single packet getting from point A (e.g., a branch office) to point B (e.g., a customer/client calling in to get assistance in the form of some sort of service from a professional at the branch office). Many times a single circuit at a single location will have one or more LECs involved, and sometimes more than three involved. Typically, an organization that has purchased a circuit from a service provider does not know that the service provider has to utilize a LEC for last mile connectivity. Many times, the service provider will utilize multiple LECs depending on the needs of the service provider to get the circuit connected. This means that the service provider has less visibility and control over even a single circuit purchased from them than what an organization purchasing the circuit from the service provider is thinking. This makes it very hard most of the time to troubleshoot issues and get service levels met, since there are multiple entities involved with one circuit and usually multiple circuits for a single transmission, which compounds dependencies and problems.
In most cases, there are multiple LECs as well as multiple service providers with multiple LECs, making it very hard to get true end-to-end visibility and optimization. Problems arise when trying to (i) ensure proper service levels (e.g., quality of service) before failover, (ii) ensure proper failover, and (iii) ensure proper service levels and connectivity during failover. For instance, the lack of end-to-end visibility can force traffic patterns to take sub-optimal/asymmetric paths that create poor performance of transmissions and many times create a complete loss of connectivity due to firewall stateful failures and/or traffic being blackholed due to lack of routing knowledge of the destination. Further, with current setups, it is very hard to ensure proper restoration after original primary circuits come back up after failing.
Many times, when a primary circuit fails, organizations are forced to just wait it out and to try and do as much as they can in a damage control mode over the secondary circuit until the actual primary circuit comes back online. Typically, the transition to get to the backup circuit and have the backup circuit operate at a level the organization needs is too arduous. Then, with a flapping primary circuit (e.g., where the primary circuit constantly goes up and down), this creates multiple problems for an organization. Even if the circuit is not flapping, the organization ends up dropping a plurality of calls and conferences or dropping business critical transaction data during the failure that the failure has hurt them immensely before the organization can even get over to the backup circuit.